


After the Fall

by archea2



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Friendship, Gen, John Finds Out, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 19:18:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another park, another bench. Mike Stamford casts his lot with another conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Fall

**Author's Note:**

> First written to fill a prompt by Morganstuart on the Sherlockmas community.
> 
> Sherlock's quote is from philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

_We so seldom notice a stranger’s absence._

 

Somebody once told Mike this to a brazen wink. Somebody in the heart of winter, quoting somebody else.

 

And now, here, in the fresh green heart of Regent’s Park, the orphaned words (for the speaker had been Sherlock, trying to embezzle an entire corpse – one of the several John Does donated to St Bart’s by the generous, pitiless winter – without checking if anyone had booked the poor devil for their anatomy lesson) strike again. Fast and low, with a pang that trips Mike’s already stuttering jog into a stop and a cautious blink (his glasses are an inconvenience in the glare) as he stares at the lonely figure before him.

 

Not that the man sitting on the grey-green bench, his gaze fixed unblinking on the sun, is a stranger to Mike. Or could ever be, for all he tried lately. No, it's something else that makes Sherlock’s words resurface in Mike’s mind, harshly appropriate. For here, just beside the open grass where young mothers squat laughing, holding out their arms to catch a bright-coloured ball or a wobbly toddler, and lovers’ mouths touch lazily in the heat, his old friend John Watson is turning himself into a...

 

"You all right, matey? Need a lungful or two?"

 

The elderly jogger in the Dutch blue cap behind him has caught up and is hopping from one foot to another in sweat and sympathy. Mike nods him clear, watches him trot away without a glance at the still face, the grief-ridden face on the path side.

 

...stranger.

 

And Mike, who has been privy to many stories in the course of his life, perhaps because his cushiony face and manners act as a natural magnet, now remembers. One year ago, in a pub's penumbra, John telling him about the sand haze in Helmand. The light gets too hot, John had said, and the air ripples down like quicksilver before your eyes, whisking the dry hills into nothingness. And whatever lay in ambush there. Nature fighting both sides of the war. Hid them from us, hid us from them, until you couldn’t tell where the one ended and the other started, the mirage and the war.

 

Four months later, in the green of summer, Mike can see how John’s hands, laid on each knee, curl into a faint show of knuckles. Park benches usually accomodate two, but John’s knuckles spell out a simple message  –  _You don’t want to notice me_.

 

The bench gives a soft ancient creak as Mike lowers himself. Ah, well. Volume is presence, Mike tells himself in good-natured absolution, and waits for John to reappear out of the brilliant, empty sky.

 

\------------------------------------------

 

"Don’t," John says, his tones too curt for a plea.

 

Mike bids his time. Back in their studying days, when he was known to his pals as Friar Tuck (liked to drive his pint home, even then) and John as their honorary prankster, talk didn't come easy. Because it was one thing to book "The Hon. Emma Rhoid" an appointment with poor Doctor Brewster, their chief of service;  but quite another when John crashed their flat after half a week-end away at his sister's, barreled into their kitchen, grabbed their (empty, thank god) teapot it and shattered it against the wall in a savage, silent, cathartic –

 

"Meaning, don’t make me speak of it."

 

Mike’s chuckle starts them both. "Can’t, Little John. Not enough - breath – left, for a start. And I bet you sent them all packing. The talking heads."

 

"Too right." His friend turns to face him, and Mike can sense the deeper tug-of-war, between the John clinging to his cloak of invisibility and the John who has to be thinking of another park, another encounter. The John reaching tentatively out of the haze.

 

"Been at it non stop. Saying I mustn’t bottle it up, the shock, the trauma. Speak it loud and clear, John Watson. Write it all down, John Watson. Make a speech, a blog entry, make a sodding PowerPoint display. As if I – Christ. Did you see him at all?"

 

"No." Mike bends forward to open the backpack at his feet. "I was with you all the time, 'member? Young Molly's orders, to patch you up and get you home since you weren't exactly in a heal-thyself condition. And later, when I offered to do the p.m. myself – well, I told you. There she was, standing by the door like the archangel Michael in a ruffled mauve blouse, saying she’d done the job and didn’t need any more people gawking at him. And it –"

 

– has stuck with him, because  _gawk_  is nothing like Molly’s brand of words;  _gawk_ , if anything, sounds like Sherlock’s department – but Mike knows from practice that there’s no telling with love and loss. Molly had apologised when he’d come back, bringing coffee soaked with enough sugar to keep the whole dental school on their toes, and asked in a shaky whisper if he would co-sign the form.

 

"Don’t know that he’d have minded." John is twisting off the cap of the water bottle with one hand. " _He_ told me to look, after all."

 

"Who, Sherlock?"

 

"Yeah, Sherlock. And that’s what I’m supposed to roar about, his making me watch. His. His. Him falling. Except, no. I've tried, and it only feels like trying to scream underwater. I mean, what's the point of being mad at something that makes fuck-all sense? Mike, he _hated_ defeat. Nothing riled him more than to make a poor show of himself. Do you know, the _one_ time I wanted to blog about a hitch in a case, he... atomized a muffin in my face. God, he could be so ridiculous. A walking vanity case, Lestrade used to call him. And that man, that very man, my ridiculous brilliant Sherlock, tells me to watch while he takes the wrong way out?"

 

John’s voice rises in an air gone sluggish with the smell of verbena and elderflower, and the long grass pressed under all the summering bodies. Mike doesn’t answer.

 

 "You want to know the worst? What – really – takes me apart? There _was_ a way out. His brother, to start with. And the most damning evidence came from a child scared out of her wits and an article in  _The Sun_ , hardly your prizewitness in the eyes of the law. And that was enough to make him die? Him, the genius? Mr One-Jump-Ahead –  _ah!_ " John is laughing, but to Mike it sounds as if John’s last breath was curdling in his throat, and his eyes are fogged-out.

 

"See? I can’t pull it right, and it’s killing me. Sometimes, I want to hope – but I know what I saw. And it’s not like he could have whipped up a corpse, just like that?"

 

 _Could he_ , Mike thinks, and feels a ripple in his mind. As if John's talk, this dry, furious pitter of words cast between them, had left widening rings in their fall. Sooner or later the rings will touch, the ring will connect, and there is no telling what the consequences will be if Mike follows the trail.

 

There is a choice to be made. If he says what is on his mind, there is no telling what will shatter this time, and how far the cracks will run. And Mike’s happy life – a life tucked in on every side by the warmth and peace of routine – may not be spared.

 

Or he can rise, wish John the best and resume his path, while his friend fades back to his quiet, unquiet Limbo.

 

"Oh, I wouln’t put it past him," Mike says quietly. "He did it once, you know. Pinched a corpse of mine. I caught him red-handed." He chuckles quietly. "Well, gloved-handed. Told him that cutting my classes was up to him, but nicking Barts’ property was a whole different tune."

 

John’s face, always malleable, is changing as he speaks. Angering up from the look of him, the little black dots clouding up in John's clear eyes. As if all of John's blood was rising to the call, Mike thinks, manning his strength, uncurling his fists so John can grasp Mike’s shoulder as he speaks the next urgent words.

 

"The Baskerville case. I never wrote about this, but he – Mike, he made me see something monstrous. Something insanely, unbearably monstrous. And it wasn’t there. Never had been, as I found. Sherlock's call, the whole bloody time, Sherlock's sleigh of hand."

 

Mike looks at the tears. "He’s like that, isn’t he? "

 

"Alive," John says slowly, as if their talk itself had been the puzzle, the maze, and the word had made it at long last out of the maze and into the sun. "Where does that leave me?"

 

Well, there’s plenty of answers to that. With a breach of trust, for starters. And a blank cheque on waiting, until their strange friend comes home to roost. But all that can wait, as Mike covers the hand with his own, smiling, and fumbles into the backpack for a clean towel.

 

"Same as last time, I guess?"

 

"Last time?"

 

"Last time you watched a fall."

 

The rings well on, widen, connect across the years. There's a students’ kitchen and a note written in John’s small, jagged hand, pinned to a cheque.

 

_She was sitting when I came, drinking her tea, same as last night. I took a mug and sat, and she poured, looking at me, and I could see no smoke rising. So I thought she’d let the tea go cold, and then I knew. Could smell it straight out of the mug. She looked at me and said  "Johnny Walker", and she laughed and laughed, and she was still laughing when I left. I’m sorry, Tuck. You deserve a safer man to have around._

 

"I went on a war," John says, and, for the first time his gaze takes in the stretch of green fields, and they become territory.

 

"And she – "

 

"Back on her feet, yeah. I think."

 

They linger on a bit under the strollers' absent eyes, the small man in the soft-worn tee and the chubby, middle-of-the-road bourgeois. The fighter and the healer.

 

"D’you know what he told me," Mike says out of the blue, because he can see the final ring grow and glower until it merges seamlessly into the pattern. "When we first met?"

 

"Piss off?"

 

Mike matches the smirk with a twinkle. "You’ll never guess. He said – I think he was quoting someone, but I can’t remember whom. He said something about a stranger’s absence usually going unnoticed."

 

And Sherlock himself is becoming an Internet has-been, a mere wrinkle on the media’s troubled waters, smoothed out by each next wave of news.

 

"Well." John stands up and Mike, watching the crease on his brow, thinks  _lion’s wrinkle_  with a surge of love. "Time to prove him wrong, yeah?"

 

"Lead on, Little John. But this time, we’re having a decent meal first – with ale and venison. There’s a pub just outside the next gate."

 

John laughs, openly laughs under the sun, and takes the first firm step across the battlefield.


End file.
